Museum anthropology

Museum anthropology is a domain of scholarship and professional practice in the discipline of anthropology.

A distinctive characteristic of museum anthropology is that it cross-cuts anthropology's sub-fields (archaeology, cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology) as these are understood in North American anthropology. All of these areas are sometimes pursued in museum contexts (usually on the basis of research work with systematic collections) and all can be (and are) explicated in museum-based exhibitions and public programs. Some museum anthropologists work full or part-time in museum contexts while others are anthropologists (employed in diverse settings) interested in studying museums as social institutions in cultural and historical context. These two sets of concerns—collections-based scholarship and the study of museums—provide the core around which the domain of museum anthropology has self-organized.

One theme prominent in recent museum anthropology research concerns reconnecting older collections of ethnographic objects curated in museum contexts with the present-day source communities from which these objects were gathered. Another concern is the development of museums and cultural centers by indigenous peoples in their own home communities.

There is much traffic between museum anthropology and the related, overlapping, and neighboring domains of (general) archaeology, museum folklore, material culture studies, historical anthropology, visual anthropology, the anthropology of art, and the history of anthropology, as well as the art history of non-western societies and the field of museum studies.

The journals Museum Anthropology, Journal of Museum Ethnography, Gradhiva, and Museum Anthropology Review are closely identified with museum anthropology as a field.

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